Friday, November 19, 2004

BGa (my boss) and Saroo (my teammate) got engaged recently. Congratulations and best wishes to them. A few words about them is in order:

BGa is a one man army in my book. He single handedly designed/built ETV's systems and networking department. More about his technical achievements in a later post. He is a great source of inspiration for me. I've been working with him for the last 18 months and its been a great experience. Learnt a lot from him simply by sitting next to him and watch him work. Besides being a terrific programmer, he is also a great manager. Took the bullet(s) and shielded our team on many occasions. It is a previlage, working with him.

Saroo is quite a chirpy person (she is nicknamed squirrel for a reason). Works very hard and for long hours (her uptime records are probably bettered only by Jagan I think). Has good sense of humour and a very good team person. She started her career in ETV as a copy editor then switched to system administration before settling(?) in the graphics department. Nice person to have on the team.

Hope their marriage date does'nt clash with the upcoming stupid elections in Bihar.

From what I've read in local magazines and seen on TV, looks like the Sankaracharya of Kanchi Mutt is in big trouble.

I still remember the good old days when I used to stand in the queue at 5:00am to catch a glimpse of the Paramacharya. After he passed away, we stopped going to the Mutt. Too bad the mutt is in news for all the wrong reasons. The image sure has taken a severe beating.

Sunday, November 14, 2004

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

As I write this, g++ is grinding my hard disk trying to compile a simple application using the FOX toolkit. I'm a big fan of fast compilers (who is'nt ?). At work I use Delphi/Kylix which are very fast. When I write gtk+ apps I prefer the Tiny C Compiler to
compile and run the code during development (the final binary ofcourse will be produced by gcc). This compiler is arguably the fastest I've tried. Recently version 0.9.22 has been released.

Another brutally fast compiler is the SmartEiffel Eiffel compiler. For a compiler that has to compile a fairly large language, do whole program optimizations and where the library is maintained only in source form, the compile times are excellent. Combined with tcc, SmartEiffel reduces build times considerably.

Other fast compilers that I occasionally dabble with:

Free Pascal - A delphi compatible compiler that works on a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. Actively maintained.